And it's one large reason why salaries have stagnated, especially in the service industry where there are numerous applications for a position, they'll simply get the lowest bidder who is capable enough to do the job.
Raising the minimum wage could help a little, but I suspect most will just cut employees and merge roles, and again find the lowest bidder.
Where I live in Vermont, nearly every business has a "Help Wanted" sign- from gas stations and McDonald's through construction, engineering, and knowledge work. None of these places are paying minimum wage.
I'm sure there are other places where the inverse is true - the issue has more to do with the distribution of people and work rather than sheer numbers, at least at this point.
In my country (Finland) even entry-level jobs that pay peanuts often have multi-round interviews, with applicants recording videos and taking psychological tests. It's all handled by recruiting firms, which make good money by filtering the masses of desperate applicants through meaningless tasks like this.
Even if the workforce is small, job market can still be highly competitive when the there are simply too few successful employers.
What you all are discussing is specifically the jobs market, which is a much more narrow issue. The biggest problem with employment is matching worker skill to the available jobs.
Money does not, however, measure wealth. Satisfaction of needs does.
That is where industrialization came in. And that might also be why we will see a stagnation of wealth.
There are not many needs that need to be solved (from a commodity point of view).
Current needs are more of a social and spiritual nature, and the markets are not efficient at providing to these.
The best projections we have say our population will likely inflect downwards by the end of this century. In other words, we probably won’t even reach overpopulation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_gr...